Rush Limbaugh, who has been critical of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), embraced him Thursday now that they have a common enemy: The New York Times.

Limbaugh and other conservative commentators rushed to defend McCain on Thursday against a potentially damaging article in The New York Times, embracing a maverick they have often attacked.

"You're surprised that Page Six-type gossip is on the front page of The New York Times?" Limbaugh asked as he began his radio show. "Where have you been? How in the world can anybody be surprised?"

Limbaugh said earlier in an e-mail to Politico that the Times article about McCain’s relationship with a female lobbyist was a clear case of "the drive-by media ... trying to take him out."

Laura Ingraham, another influential conservative radio host, asserted that the Times waited until McCain was on the brink of the Republican presidential nomination and now is seeking to "contaminate" him with an article that she calls "absurd" and "ridiculous."

CBN.org, the website of the Christian Broadcasting Network, calls an attack by the Times "a conservative badge of honor."

Ironically, a potentially damaging article about McCain may help bond him to conservatives, who are relishing the fact that he now needs them.

"Is he going to learn the right lesson from this?” Limbaugh asked. “The lesson is that liberals are to be defeated."

Limbaugh wrote in an e-mail to Politico: “The story is not the story. The story is the drive-by media turning on its favorite maverick and trying to take him out. The media picked the GOP's candidate, the NYT endorsed him while they sat on this story and is now, with utter predictability, trying to destroy him.”

Limbaugh added: “This is what you get when you walk across the aisle and try to make these people your friends. I'm not surprised in the least that the NYT would try to take out John McCain. Predicted this, in fact, way back in the early 2000s. Sen. McCain courted the media, cultivated them, even bragged that the media was his ‘base.’ I cringed when I heard it because the media turning on McCain was as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.”

Limbaugh was one of several influential conservatives who, to the delight and relief of the McCain campaign, immediately decided that the behavior of the Times — not the senator — should be the issue.

Ingraham began her show this morning with a brief dig at McCain's years of cozying up to the mainstream media, but then declared: “You wait until it’s pretty much beyond a doubt that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, and then you let it drop — drop some acid in the pool, contaminate the whole pool. That’s what The New York Times thinks.”

Ingraham was deriding the front-page article suggesting McCain had a romantic relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist in 1999, when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Ingraham was among the conservatives who endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney before he dropped out of the nomination race, and she has been among the high-profile talk show hosts who have been very critical of McCain.

McCain has been jokingly called “the senator from ‘Meet the Press’" because of his cozy relations with the elite media.

Ingraham said triumphantly, “I ask the McCain campaign this question: Do you think you need talk radio now? Do you think that talk radio’s important to set the record straight, or do you think a press conference, where the media is shouting question after question at you — do you think that's going to put an end to all of this?”

David Brody, who has a large evangelical audience for his “Brody File” blog on CBN.com, wrote this morning: “In [the] conservative world, if The New York Times does a ‘hit job’ on you, then you wear that as a conservative badge of honor. This story could actually help John McCain."

Brody wrote in an earlier post: “The NY Times has no evidence in their story that there was actually a romantic relationship. No phone calls, e-mails, etc.”

Ingraham read from the article with a mocking tone — even adding “comma” at one point — noting what she considered omissions and fallacies.

“I’m reading through this piece and I’m thinking, Did McCain think that having all these people on the Straight Talk Express — and getting Jonathan Alter and all these guys to sit down with him and laugh and chat — do you think that was going to inoculate him from this kind of absurd attack?” Ingraham mused. “Of course it wasn’t going to.”

Ingraham called it “one of the more ridiculous pieces I have read in some time,” and specifically took up for McCain by pointing out that he had voted against the interests of the lobbyist’s client.

Reminding her listeners why she had once bashed McCain, she needled him this morning for “intimacy of the sort that no one had ever seen between a Republican and a member of the media.”

“John McCain stands before all of these reporters that he has been yukking it up with over the years,” Ingraham said. “And I think he is stunned, frankly. I think he’s stunned that all his old friends would turn on him.”

In a news conference this morning, McCain denied that he had anything more than a friendly relationship with the woman and said he was “disappointed in The New York Times.”

In contrast to the fiery reaction of his aides, who have vowed to go to war with the newspaper, McCain was subdued and more docile and formal than usual as he appeared before cameras with his wife, Cindy.

McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis told CBS’s “The Early Show” that the article is the “worst kind of tabloid journalism.”

“They show absolutely no evidence of anything that he ever did for this lobbyist,” Davis said. “And ironically, they take [on] the man who is probably most feared by every lobbyist in this town of Washington, the man who's never done a favor for a lobbyist or a special interest, a man who has authored the ethics legislation, gone after the Jack Abramoffs of the world and really set the standard for ethical behavior in this town — and without one shred of evidence.”

Patrick Hynes, a blogger who is on contract with McCain, has been rounding up conservative blogger defense early this morning and sending it out to other conservative bloggers.

“What Some Folks Are Saying About Times Hit Job,” Hynes wrote in a blast e-mail at 6:47 Thursday morning.

Greg Mueller, a veteran Republican strategist, said conservatives would side with McCain against the paper they love to hate.

“The New York Times is trying to swift-boat McCain,” Mueller said. “This is the first real salvo of the general election. Certainly, the Times cannot complain about a negative general election campaign, since they fired the first shot.

"It was a poor and revealing attempt by The New York Times to try and smear McCain at a time when he is starting to define Obama as an inexperienced liberal, so The New York Time takes up for Obama's defense. If anything, this helps energize conservatives to come to McCain's aid in beating back attacks by The New York Times and other liberal MSM outlets."